Salt and Static

KSEA broadcast at four hundred watts, which meant that on a clear night you could hear it all the way to the cannery and on a foggy night you could hear it in your own kitchen and nowhere else.

Della had hosted the overnight show for six years. Nobody called before midnight. After midnight, the lonely called, and the insomniacs, and the fishermen's wives who could not sleep until the boats came in. Della liked them all. She liked the way the town was more honest at two in the morning.

Then, in March, the Tuesday caller started.

"There's a wreck at forty fathoms off Pillar Rock," the woman said the first time. "A schooner. The figurehead is a woman with her hands over her ears."

Della laughed and said thank you for calling and played a Patsy Cline song. The next week a diver from the college went down off Pillar Rock and came up white-faced with a photograph of a wooden woman, hands pressed over her ears.

After that, Della waited for Tuesdays.

The caller described a field of anemones that opened only for whales. A cable that sang when the current hit it. A cave where the sand was arranged in spirals no tide could make. Every week, someone went and looked. Every week, she was right.

"How do you know these things?" Della finally asked.

A long pause. Static, like surf.

"I'm closer to them than you are," the caller said.

Tonight it was raining, and the board was quiet, and the clock said 2:01 when line one lit up.

"Hi, Della."

"Hi. What've you got for us tonight?"

"You," the caller said gently. "You're wearing your brother's sweater. The blue one. You still haven't washed it, because it still smells like him."

Della's hand found the sleeve without meaning to.

"He's all right," the caller said. "I wanted you to know. It's quiet down here, and the light comes through green, and he isn't cold."

The line went to static. Della let it run, on air, for a long time — the sound of the sea, four hundred watts, all the way to the cannery.